The Government is conducting a review of special education. We have submitted our views on the points raised by the review and we have contributed to a submission on behalf of the blindness sector. Last week Martine Abel and I appeared in person in front of the review panel to speak in support of our submission. Amongst the panel members was the Associate Minister for Education, Hon. Heather Roy.

The Government is conducting a review of special education. We have submitted our views on the points raised by the review and we have contributed to a submission on behalf of the blindness sector. Last week Martine Abel and I appeared in person in front of the review panel to speak in support of our submission. Amongst the panel members was the Associate Minister for Education, Hon. Heather Roy.

First and foremost, like all other students, blind and low vision students have a right to be educated to their maximum potential. This is the principle that guides our approach to this topic. As blind adults who have had the benefit of good education, we’re interested in special education because we want to ensure future generations of blind New Zealanders have the best possible chance to gain full employment and all the other usual benefits, and take on all the usual obligations, of citizenship.

Like most other disability groups, we support the principle of inclusion, which in simple terms means that a student with a disability has the ultimate right to be educated at a local school along with other students who do not have a disability.

But unlike some who are opposed in principle to special schools, we see an important place for a special school in the education of blind and low vision students. The current special school for these students is BLENNZ, the Blind and Low Vision Education Network NZ. It has a campus at Homai in South Auckland and a number of visual resource centres around the country. It employs most of the specialist teachers who teach the fundamental skills of blindness, such as braille, adaptive technology, and how to get around with confidence.

A special school is important because it can provide an alternative setting for a student to be educated if he or she is not coping in a mainstream school. It might be easier for that student to spend some time learning in a special school setting, where they can also learn the fundamental skills of blindness, so that they might then be able to cope properly in a mainstream school environment. A special school can also provide a setting to bring blind and low vision students together in small groups for short-term intensive courses focusing on specific topics, such as learning music through braille, gaining the most from adaptive technology, and learning other fundamental blindness skills. One advantage of this approach is that if a student is the only blind or low vision student at their school, they get the opportunity to meet other students with a similar disability. Friendships can thus form and nowadays there is considerable scope for blind and low vision students to support each other around the country by phone and email.

We acknowledged that the number of specialist teachers has significantly increased in recent years. But we emphasised that it is crucial that funding be maintained and linked to the numbers of students from year to year, to ensure there will always be enough teachers specially trained to teach these skills to future generations.

These specialists perform another important role as well. Particularly in mainstream schools, they help the blind student access the education offered by the school. Often this involves turning printed and visual information into an accessible format.

Obviously it is important that blind and low vision students have access to the specialist support they need, but this should not let the school itself off the hook. We emphasise that all schools have an obligation to ensure that they deliver education in a way that is accessible to everyone. When a blind child is in the class, the teacher has the same obligation to teach that child as he or she does to teach the others in the class. Teachers must therefore plan their education so that it includes students with disabilities as much as possible. We believe all teachers should have a basic grounding in how to teach students with disabilities.

We are very concerned when it appears that schools essentially ignore the needs of a blind or low vision student, expecting that these will be picked up by the specialist support teachers provided by BLENNZ. Schools should be obliged, for example, to choose school textbooks that are available in accessible formats or which are at least readily transcribable. Schools should also be obliged to work to time frames so a blind or low vision student is not penalised by the delays often inherent in obtaining materials in an accessible format. Think how you would feel as a parent if your child came home from school saying that he or she did not have the same materials to read as the other kids in the class. In our experience, often when a blind student is penalised in this way, it has been the result of poor planning on the part of the school.

In a similar vein, schools are nowadays developing exciting new e-learning environments. Today’s technology offers wonderful new opportunities to directly include blind students, but only if these students can have access to today’s specialised technology, and, perhaps more importantly, if schools ensure that their e-learning environments are accessible in the first place. We expressed a real concern to the review panel that it is all too easy for schools to overlook the principles of accessibility and universal design when creating their e-learning environments. In our experience, it is often very expensive if not almost impossible to add accessibility to a technology project as an afterthought, and sometimes a complete redesign is required. But it is generally not expensive if accessibility is included as a guiding principle in the design from the outset.

The principle of accessibility must be fundamental if blind and low vision students are to be properly educated in mainstream schools. Few people nowadays would question the need for the school environment to be physically accessible so students in wheelchairs can fully participate. Blind students generally have no difficulty physically in a building, but if when they get into the building they find everything inaccessible, they are in much the same position as the physically disabled student in a wheelchair who can’t get up the stairs. Thus we believe that accessibility of information and technology is just as important. That way, we can guarantee a blind student can fully and independently participate in their education in much the same way as their sighted peers.